I love gifs! (quite like that one that Rey posted above too!).....
...and I don't think there's any lack of photoshop skills involved in doing one. Sure you can hide a few imperfections that may not show up in an optimised gif, but on the whole, I always used to chop gifs as full size/hi res images. Most involved some PS manipulation or clean up, and some up to 30-40 frames (this can become a real chore!). Quite a few of my gifs actually started as static images before I decided on animating them. I remember when we had lots of gifs here with Andy, Sean, Ted and Co. submitting on a regular basis. Hell, Anfa has done some wicked gifs, and Vok (as mentioned above). We even got Rey to do one once (with some serious badgering).
Seeing a good one always inspires me to want to chop myself. In fact, I might have a look through the upcoming sources and see if anything grabs me. I had actually started a gif for the 'I feel flattened' contest, but never got around to finishing it.
Just to chew up some bandwidth, I'm going to post a few below. While some are fairly simple, others involved hours of work. Some required big cleanup jobs before even thinking about animating them. The night time flashing light ones require heaps of work on frame timing. There's perspective issues, shadows and blur. The bouncing boobs took ages to get the right bounce!
Anyway, enjoy.